The Bottom Line: The new Mazda6 Sport has the power to change
initial opinions. It has good styling, decent power and handling, all at an
affordable price.

When my wife first sat in the Mazda6 Sport she was
underwhelmed, to be kind. She didn’t like the interior and when she
saw that it had a manual transmission, she was really unfriendly to the
car. To be fair, the manual wasn’t Mazda’s fault; she just
knows how less-than-smoothly I shift.

When she exited the car for the last time a week later,
she admitted that her rush to judgment was just that. After a week and a
couple of hundred miles in the Mazda6 she looked much more favorably on it.
She liked the overall styling, inside and out, and admitted that the
plainness of the interior was more a reflection of the car we had prior to
the Mazda6 than on the Mazda6 itself. She also applauded the excellent fuel
economy we achieved on two long trips, 33.3 mpg overall.

Okay, then, you can get good economy from several little
econoboxes. But the Mazda6 is a real car, a m id-size with good dimensions
all around. The front seats, for example, are comfortable –
important on long rides – and offer good side support.

There is good power from the 2.5-liter inline four. The
manual transmission allows you to extract the mot power from the engine in
that you can downshift when you want that extra boost. Shifting is not a
problem, which made my wife happy, although in all honesty we didn’t
shift a lot on our longer trips.

The Sport version of the Mazda6 is the base model with no
frills. The manual transmission, manual seats and basic sound system attest
to this. Still, we had pushbutton start and stop, so this is no bare-bones
base model.

For entertainment we had AM/FM, CD and a USB connection. The audio
system has two knobs and the HVAC system has three.

There’s also no navigation system, but this helps keep the
price affordable. Honestly, I like navi systems, but the world won’t
come to an end if a car doesn’t have one. To compensate, I have
navigation on my smart phone plus a TomTom just in case.

Overall styling is very much in the Ford idiom, reflecting
the years when Mazda was under the Ford umbrella. The Mazda6 has a smaller
grille than its Blue Oval counterpart, and it competes with the Fusion, so
you don’t want them to look too much alike.

Drive quality is very good. A feature I appreciated and
haven’t felt in many other cars is the ability for the Mazda6 to
track down the highway. The car is in its own way a definition of
Newton’s first law- a body in motion tend to stay in motion. If the
Mazda6 is going straight down the road, it tends to stay straight.
There’s no forced control of the steering wheel, it just stays the
course. Similarly, when you’re in a corner and you aren’t
encountering strange things – i.e. no decreasing radius turns or
anything – the car stays the course as well, with little or no added
input from the driver required.

The rear seats are comfortable, if firm. They offer good
rear leg room. The seat backs fold with a release in the trunk to expand
cargo capacity. There’s good rear and side visibility for rear
passengers to alleviate any claustrophobia. Rear visibility is also good
for the driver.

So while my wife derided the Mazda6 when she first sat in
it, she appreciated all that Mazda has put into the economy version of its
mid-size sedan by the time our test was over. The Mazdqa6 is, at its heart,
a very good car. You can load it up with all the added goodies you want or
you can take it as it is with the advantage of a better ticker price.